Never Forget Another Appointment Using Tiger's Automator

In this synced-up, wireless world, keeping information at hand has never been easier. But having your calendar in your PDA doesn't mean that you won't forget to look at said calendar and notice that you're supposed to pick up your cousin's son from soccer practice! With a little help from Mac OS X Tiger's Automator, however, you'll never miss an appointment again. Jaemi Loeb shows you the ropes.

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In this synced-up, wireless world of ours, keeping information at hand has
never been easier. But having your calendar in your PDA doesn’t mean that
you won’t forget to look at said calendar and notice that you’re
supposed to pick up your cousin’s son from soccer practice. With a little
help from Mac OS X Tiger’s Automator, however, you’ll never miss an
appointment again.

I created two handy workflows that you can use with Automator to help remind
you of important events. The first workflow ("Reminder app"), which
can be downloaded here, results in an email whose body text is a summary of your
events for the day. The other workflow ("Reminder app 2"), which can
be downloaded here, results in an email with that same information attached to
the email as a text file. Which one you use, of course, depends on personal
preference, how your email program handles attachments, etc.

Putting Workflows to Work

The basic process is quite short. Double-click the workflow to open it in
Automator and replace the email address in the New Mail Message action with
a real one. Use the drop-down menus to change the settings in the Find Events
In iCal action so that they’re useful to you. Maybe you keep important
events in your Blarg calendar, for example, or maybe you need to be reminded
only of events that happen in a certain location. In any case, there are many
ways to change the search criteria for this action, so feel free to experiment.

After you customize these settings, choose Save As from the File menu. From
the File Format drop-down menu, choose Application instead of the default Workflow.

Here’s the drop box you need to change. It might clarify things to uncheck
the Hide Extension box so that you always know what format you’re saving
to.

You now have a free-standing application that can be run at any time. Its
icon in a Finder window will look very much like the Automator icon, but it
will run without opening Automator.

Once you have a stand-alone application, you might realize that simply having
it doesn’t help. After all, if you could remember to run the application
in the morning, you probably wouldn’t need it to remind you of certain
events! Fortunately, there is a little-known but easy way to automate the application
to run in your absence.

You probably know that you can set alarms for events in iCal. (The simple
process can be learned through iCal help or the Apple support Web
site.) What you may not have noticed, however, are all the options you
have when setting an alarm. If you look at an event’s information in
the information pane, you might see something like this:

Notice the option Open File in this window. When you choose this option, a
few more menus will appear in your iCal info pane. The default file for it
to open is, of course, iCal. But you can choose Other instead and then locate
and select your new application.

After all these choices and settings (which will quickly become second nature),
you’ll have a fully automated application that will send you a reminder
email when that iCal alarm goes off.